skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OMICS Publishing Group
Metabolomics-2012 will serve as a catalyst for the advances in the study of Metabolomics & Systems Biology by connecting scientists within and across disciplines at sessions and exhibition held at the venue, creates an environment conducive to information exchange, generation of new ideas, and acceleration of applications that benefit Research in Metabolomics & Systems Biology.For more details please visit:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOfFUeObLGU
Agreed, ExtremeTech is not my favorite news source. Their atrocious mobile interface reflects their editorial stance, all style and no substance
I'm pretty sure you can use GitHub's Windows app for BitBucket Git repositories. I've pointed it to non-GitHub repositories at work in the past. You should look into it for your friend.
No, but knowing the rules would help if we're trying to break them (hack the universe).
eBay Unveils A Pinterest-Inspired Redesign
Open Source Projects, a Year On
This would make more sense if being contacted by a Google recruiter was an honor limited to an Elite Few, and therefore the opinions of anyone who's experienced it would automatically be of interest.

However, I've been contacted by Google recruiters twice, and I'm such a dumb-ass I'm consistently amazed I can walk around on two legs. If they've made their way down the "potential recruits" list all the way to me, it's safe to assume that they cast their net pretty wide.
I don't see how capitalizing all words makes it easier to understand English sentences (Can You Hear Me Now)?
To me the issue is that the most important thing about a database is the data. If you're reviewing code with a join to an unknown table or view, will a "tbl" in front of the object really swing your vote between "This is passable code" and "I better dig deeper"?

If I'm looking at a join I need to make sure that the data is how I'd expect- is it 1..1, 1..many? If I don't have a good understanding of the object and the data it contains, I don't care if it has a prefix, I'm going to dig deeper. If I dig deeper I'm going to remember what that object represents and I won't need a prefix in the future.

So what exactly is the use case of the "tbl" prefix? Are you skimming over unknown objects just because they have a prefix? I don't see any upside.
I posted in the middle of the night, and didn't do enough fact checking, so I apologize for the use of that word.
Yes. Or alternately, creating a set of views to alias the base tables, and only allowing direct access to the views.

Either way gets you some degree of surface area management. Procedures have some added benefit--it's a lot easier to inspect the flow of data when everything is routed through procedure calls. It's a lot easier to put that flow in context when you have a procedure name as a label, provided that your procedures implement a batchful interface.
not like eBay needs to be "saved", but still good to know they're finally redesigning the site. maybe other sites should follow suit coughhackernewscough
I also am sensing ExtremeTech has a vendetta against MS.
Interesting take on a/b testing. A small suggestion - it would be nice if clicking on the buttons after the text "Which icon do you prefer?" actually demonstrated how the service worked. It took me a while to realize that you need to click on the 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 steps to go through the process (they don't look clickable).
Wants more choices but calls everything but youtube and vimeo crap aggregators.

This guy is no different than someone who protests Wal-Mart and shops there.
Is a Certification of Compliance Worth the Effort for Accessibility?
Hey guys, I created this tool and I'll be around answering questions throughout the day!
I just better not end up being flushed out of a sewer pipe when this is all over. I hate swimming naked.
Only if you think that an uninformed philosophical rant is any sort of answer to a recruiter whose job consists of getting you to interview for her/his employer. They don't control the whims of the whole industry.
Zeus solves long rails init problem
The IPO has done a lot to convince me that Facebook is a fundamentally slimy company. Regular day-by-day use of Facebook convinces a lot of my friends of the same thing. So why are we using Facebook day by day? Because we think we can catch up with one another's news and have interesting discussions on topics we all enjoy at the expense of Facebook's investors.

This has been done before. A lot of my friends used to hold their noses and gripe about AOL, but use it daily. AOL was founded in the 1980s, so it has reached the twenty-five-year age referred to in another comment in this thread. AOL is still in business, amazingly, although it is now far from being the dominant company in online interaction (that would be Facebook, these days). I've said it before, and I'll say it again: "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it." I could be wrong, but that's my sense of where Facebook is in the market.
You should watch the film (Queen of Versailles). It's clear that 1) he's completely devoid of a soul; 2) he exploited the cheap money thing knowingly to build his business on subprime loans and didn't care who got hurt in the process (see #1). He's the perfect modern Republican. His wife comes off much more compassionately, and quite honestly, smarter, if likely insecure and troubled.
Echoing the previous comment somewhat-- what about hadoop do you want to learn?

If you want to get practice with map-reduce patterns themselves, but not spend much time worrying about the ops associated with setting up hadoop clusters, you can play with Elastic-Map-Reduce (EMR) on AWS.

There is even a great python-based open source tool called mrjob (http://packages.python.org/mrjob/index.html) made by some folks at Yelp that makes using EMR really easy. There are a bunch of great tutorials already out there.
This would be a great story to post on a Mainstream Media news site.
Thanks for the feedback!

I have it auto-advancing from 1 to 2, which I thought would demonstrate that it was interactive, but I guess it still needs work :/
Yeah, Stu told me I should do that :) In all cases the output from Datomic Datalog is just a data structure. In the case of the query in the blog post, it is just a collection of 2-tuples of date + source code string. The source strings are largish, and it would have bulked up things, so I punted.

The rules don't have output until incorporated in a query - you can think of them as akin to SQL views. However, they don't need to be installed in the db, you can pass them as an arg, as the query does.
I hope this will at least stop all the "x image in css" posts.
Yep. Get me a browser, Facebook, Twitter, email and an alarm clock, and I'm happy with almost any touch-screen phone.
Yes, but you didn't need any advice to find your passion for computing. Presumably people looking for self help advice are less "self aware" than you are/were.
The existence of (say) CakePHP does not affect my point, which is that core PHP includes a lot of facilities that in other languages are part of a framework written by a third party, such as a template language.
The Frustrations of Startup Investing
Author here, and some good points raised. A couple thoughts:

* If an engineer explained why he preferred Linux to windows, he wouldn't be thorough if he didn't at least have some understanding as to why Linux was a better solution. I would assume some knowledge of the workings of Windows would be necessary to contrast the two systems. One could simply point to a performance metric perhaps, but a great engineer should dig deeper to make an effective argument.

* There are certainly some people who will claim to be experts in a particular area. True experts, in most cases, won't have to say it.

* Trying to make great software to solve business problems should require some understanding of the business problems being solved, no? I don't think you can really solve a problem without knowing what the problem is. Of course, my comments here are assuming that you are building software to solve a problem for a business - the 'business' could be substituted with 'the problem being solved', and perhaps that would make more sense for my statement if you are taking the word business literally.
This is an oversimplification - good cycling form has many benefits beyond aerodynamics and power.

For example, your typical commuter bike allows the rider to sit in a standard upright position. While many new to bikes find this more comfortable, each bump in the road sends a jolt up through the seat post that continues unimpeded vertically up the rider's spine, compressing each disc in the vertebrae. Sore butt and an aching back at the end of the ride.

Adopting road cycling form, aside from strengthening your core, allows your torso to act as a shock absorber, harmlessly waggling away the energy.
The Rise of "Gangnam Style" - Embedly Stats
Going to Amazon right now...

* edit: Doh, no Kindle version. I don't mind paying $90+ for a good book though, just like it to be electronic:
http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Theory-The-Logic-Science/d...
Show HN: binary variable puzzle
Everyone's saying it was inappropriate to send this response to a recruiter, but maybe the intent was to see if this email would make its way to Sergey Brin or Larry Page.

I would love to see their response to it.
Are there guides to setting up solar powered Pis?
FWIW, the aim for LLVM is to avoid breaking the bitcode format now 3.0 has shipped — not that it's platform independent or anything else yet.
A few  Rails Rumble tips
Actually, there has not really been a huge shift in the API or the dev tools.

Yes, there is a new native layer called "Windows Phone Runtime", which is a partial, semi-overlapping subset of the Windows Runtime found in Windows 8.

However, it's partial and incomplete, and mostly targeted at game developers - to access most of the features of Windows Phone 8, you need to write your apps in a managed language, accessing the .NET API for Windows Phone, which is pretty much the same as it's always been, with a few minor incompatibilities, even in so-called "compatibility mode" for WP7 apps.

EDIT: That was a hideous run-on sentence, but I kinda like it.
It is also of interest to note that Afghanistan is sitting atop a huge lode of rare earth minerals: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2936
The difference is that Codeq appears to be an index, while the storage of record is still a file-based git repo. Eventually you could probably work in either representation if there's reliable round-tripping.
Yes, they are relatively cheap on their own, the only problem is the added cost of a discrete card in addition to a cpu, and potentially a better power supply to support them both. In terms of many people's budgets it is nothing, but I am talking more about the average consumer. In the end, buying a desktop with a decent discrete GPU and CPU is probably going to run you at least $800; again, not a lot, but if this company could offer a competitive solution for $100, it could drive more "mainstream" adoption, although that is probably wishful thinking at this point.
I'd added a link and some notes as a comment on a related post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4636655

Here is a link to an article with a few more details about the technique being used.

http://productsecurityblog.emc.com/2012/10/split-value-crypt...
I don't like the window decorations of most window managers. Openbox allows users to set keyboard shortcuts, customize a menu that's always a couple of keystrokes away, and the window decorations can be customized as well. It's worth tolerating, but I spend a lot of time in my browser. I've been spoiled by Chrome, and now I don't want to switch away.

That said, there are a couple of other things that keep me on Chrome such as its element inspector.
Seeing a big MySQL schema where all the tables look like "tblUsers", "tblAccounts", etc. typically lights up the amateur lights for me - because pretty much when I see that, only about 58% of the tables will actually be named that way. Another 32% will be the other way, "accountsTable", "profileTable"; 10% will not have prefixes or suffixes; about 60% of the tables will be named with a plural name (i.e. "users") and 40% will be singular ("datatype"). Foreign keys being present is pretty much a 50/50 crapshoot (and in the 50% case, it's a further 50/50 chance that they actually knew to use InnoDB so that those FKs have any impact). CamelCase and lowercase_with_underscores will be gratuitously mixed, and MySQL's platform-dependent handling of casing conventions (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/identifier-case-sensi...) will go a long way towards making the semi-camelCase application, which probably doesn't quote identifier names (or does so inconsistently; all the SQL is hardcoded), non-portable.
Compared with capital investment costs of other machines for making plastic parts, 3D printers are already cheap, so I don't see price coming down as a huge player yet. Right now machine cost and part flexibility are the advantages that current 3D printers have in relation to other production methods. They will be, and are, used for production of one off custom pieces without precise tolerance and surface finish requirements.
Author here: I know HR won't read it, and even most people on HN won't. It's totally up to you just how much time you invest into reading others' visions.

In that post, I address much more than just "to work at G or not". I address the general tendency/evolution of the internet, and how I'm unhappy with it.

Re: "video is a solved problem is hilarious": yes, thanks, I'm aware of the codec mess, and I've been advocating for free and open codecs/protocols for a long while. I know computers still generally suck at extracting info from something audio-visual, etc - heck, the post is already too long, do you really expect me to cover all that?

But, again, see the bigger picture. For me, it's a solved problem because most people in most situations can watch whatever they feel like on whatever platform (except for long movies but, again, not because of a tech hurdle). It's solved as compared to, for example, collaborative music recording, with web technologies, multitrack, decentralized, with an easy merging process (the typical use case is producing an acoustic cover of some mainstream track.)

There's so much more I wanted to cover and didn't - if you have particular questions I'll try to answer them here, or if you want to reach out, send it my way at amos@movies.io
I bet you're not just better than Google, but you're also better than all of us.
"Best response to a Google Recruiter ever"

Right...

i·ro·ny
The expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.
Additional analyzers can be added. The vision is definitely not language-specific, and Rich has already done some design work for a Java analyzer.
None of what timbl said in that post (nor what anything, from memory, in that thread said) covered shipping native code to the browser: it was merely talking about privileged web apps, which is a very different problem area (and one that should definitely be explored!).
Strongly agree. Equally tenuous is the converse idea: that if we did detect some features of the physical world that were also apparent in a simulated lattice, that the best explanation for this is that we exist in a simulation.
fundamentally, how do we distinguish between 'simulation' and 'reality'? if a simulation (of any sort) exists, it is therefore real. how would a hypothetically 'simulated' universe be any different from a 'real' one?

further, proposed research that seeks to 'reveal' the universe as a 'computer simulation' suggests a limited vision. why must it be a 'computer' doing the simulating? maybe the universe (in some sense) 'computes' itself in coming into existence (think cellular automata or things of the like). if so, then it is not a 'simulation' coming into being, but 'reality' itself.

i will simply state that it is not surprising to me that 'simulations' and 'realities' have much in common -- so it is not surprising that might be mistaken for the other.

in any event, these ideas are off the top my head, i don't know how seriously to take them.
Embedly's Top Social URLs
Nor is it likely that they care. This was a huge waste of time if it was really written for and sent to a recruiter.

If they even got one paragraph in I'd be surprised. Delete - next candidate.
Video of him giving this talk on a previous date:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRfJ9lni4QA
You should enter about:flags in addressbar, then Enable experimental WebKit features. Enable experimental WebKit features that are in development.
Or you could create a VM image and then import it into the cloud.
I misspoke. Most programs use system decorations, but I do prefer the way Chrome has an option to use its own alternative.
Yeah I noticed that. My immediate reaction was to click the buttons below the "Which icon do you prefer" question though, since that's how I assume the service would work. I didn't think to click the steps until after I had tried clicking everything else.

Could just be me though, maybe you should a/b test it ;)
For the mathematicians here. I am taking Linear Algebra classes as a CS undergrad. Can someone recommend a very good book?

I am looking for the kind of book that will make you fell in love with Linear Algebra. For Calculus, I used Piskunovs Differential and Integral Calculus which was miles away from what my classmates were using. That along with Maple help to double check that my stuff was correct proved a good combo. My current Linear Algebra book is an honest book but it is a boring book, it fails to entertain or to amaze or to give you those moments of insight that puts a grin in your face.

I think I just wish I had better books as an undergrad :-(
How to Get Out of the Building with the Validation Board
Entirely agree. Big company acqui(hi)ring smaller start-ups is a different problem than increasing centralization. Both equally worrying imho, though.
Metro is interesting for its originality and almost complete lack of skeuomorphic flourishes. The problem with it though is that everything looks alike and nothing analogous. They've even eliminated drop shadows and depth-implying gradients from the interface. While those may be skeuomorphic in the broadest sense, because our vision expects depth, they provide the user by functional signifiers. Metro, in its deviant haste, went too far to the other aesthetic extreme.
This is pretty much, par for the course. During G.W. Bush's first election my SO at the time received a similar corporate communication from the executives in MBNA. Pretty much telling them they would all be out of a job if they didn't vote for Bush, so she did.
Sorry dear, can't reply. Working. <3
I dislike the prefix from a stylistic point of view only, the arguments for and against are weak.

I remember debating with our datawarehouse designer whether our tables should be singularly-named or plural. Also if the primary key should be TablenameID or just ID.

In the end it doesn't matter. The only thing that materially impacts productivity is maintaining consistent conventions. Take it from someone currently working on a database with three different object prefix styles, key naming and data access methods (ORM, stored procedures and argh dynamic SQL).
Canonical Now Solicits Donations When Downloading Ubuntu, Says Don't Freak Out
In summary: Make sure your sample size is large enough so that it is possible to get a statistically significant result.
The same thing can be done with SF MUNI.
http://www.nextmuni.com/googleMap/?a=sf-muni&r=KT&r=...

I check this before I leave every morning. I live just north of the Muni Metro East yard, so I can tell when a nice empty train is about to go into service and run over to the station just in time to catch it.

(In theory you can enable every train and bus line at once, but after a certain point the page never loads)
The biggest challenge with multiple VMs is doing GC over both: cross-VM GC is a current research topic, and nothing has shown to be doable without a noticeable perf impact.
This would be true if you were reading this in front of his personal email client.

Fact is, it's an open letter, and therefore guaranteed to connect with his target audience who are not, in fact, google.
The article does admit this later on: "the calculations by Beane and co are not without some important caveats. One problem is that the computer lattice may be constructed in an entirely different way to the one envisaged by these guys."

Another problem I see is that a lattice might be evidence of a simulation, or it might simply be fundamental. It would seem strange, but no stranger to me than some other aspects of quantum physics.

What's the difference between a truly fundamental principle, and a principle that is fundamental in our world because it's part of a simulation? How could you tell?
At least Verizon is advertising a service you can actually buy.

Don't count on it. I'm constantly pestered by Verizon to buy their FiOS service, and FiOS isn't available in my apartment complex.
Ask HN: What books have taught you practical things?
Looking for books from which HN'ers read not just for enjoyment, but directly taught them how to do something.

The ggplot2 (viz for R) book has been great:
http://www.amazon.com/ggplot2-Elegant-Graphics-Data-Analysis/dp/0387981403

Ruby Best Practices also gave me some ideas on better use of blocks to do data processing from files:
http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/posts/gregory/022-rbp-now-open.html
Yup. I'm personally a lot more excited about tent.io, but there's already so much irrelevant to a recruiter here that I didn't care to mention it.
wow, thanks for that. I do have delicious installed. The fact that it could have been a plugin is why I didn't do a bug report. I just did a fresh install, still had the problem, and was going to go into safe mode after that. I wanted to see if I could isolate the problem first. Glad someone else already did.
They're the Sun or Fox News or TMZ of tech journalism. Controversy sells, and they do business.
Do you have a primary source? I'm genuinely interested in the report if it is available. Google just gives news stories saying "OMG a plane crashed into an apartment building!" which isn't helpful to the engineer in me.
tl; dr I won't work for Leviathan.

I'm not sure I would write such a letter. It is a half truth, and you might have to eat those words if Google gets involved in something that interests you.
You learned how to program bank software in the 80s? COBOL is GREAT for that
We do, but it's not yet released. If you'd be up for it, I'd love some feedback. Hit me up at cnunciato@rhapsody.com.
It looks like this could be the first glimpse of how eBay is using its acquisition of Svpply and its team.
I agree, but actually, it's not even possible to draw a uniform 3D grid through the universe because of the curvature of spacetime. So even if the universe is a simulation, I don't think it could possibly work the way they describe and show the kind of artifact that they measure.
On Reddit it triggered a discussion about how we could make a continuous version of the Game of Go.
http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/118svz/smoothlife_a...
Naw. You're just on the Thirteenth Floor.
The Most Easy to Use Web App Firewall Ever
> I wonder if they can bring the satellite back down, or if the fuels[2] used in the satellite prevent its return.

They can't but not because of the fuels. It's because the Dragon capsule is the only part of the whole launch stack that can re-enter intact, and it's a payload to the rocket. Ther Orbcomm sat is also a payload, but a secondary one. They both get put into their correct orbits (in theory) by the disposable Falcon Upper Stage. There's no way for that Falcon Upper stage to bring anything back, it is just allowed to burn up after it's been used.